Chronological Search Engine Under Development at The Picket Line

I’m working on something kind of neat and hope to be able to roll it out here
soon, but I can’t help but toss out a sneak preview while I’m working on it.

The idea is for a “chronoscope” — a search engine that works for time. You
enter a date or a range of dates in the search, and the engine responds with
pages that cover that time or time period.

I’m still working out the quirks. It will take me a bit more programming time
to transform my mock-up into an actual web-available service. And in order for
this to work, I need to mark up eight and a half years of
Picket Line posts with
datetime tags — which I have to do by hand if I want to do it right.

But I do have a mock-up that works on the pages I’ve marked up so far
(mid-2008 to the present). For example, if I search for February through June,
1945, I get the following response:

… it forces me to a kind of personal disarmament. This is a subject I have thought about and prayed over for many years. I can recall vividly hearing the news of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. I was deeply shocked. I could not then put into words the shock I felt from the news that a city of…

… Gray received the notice that his doctorate in philosophy had been awarded in the same batch of mail that contained his draft notice. He served from 1941 to 1945 in Africa and Europe in counter-intelligence: working to root out and interrogate spies and saboteurs…

… garnering material for this article, I was handed a letter with the scribbled commentary, “required reading.” It is from one Valerie Riggs, who says that she has refused to pay income taxes since 1944 and is refusing again this year because, to put it simply, she…

… tenth person it visited, it would extinguish fewer lives than the governments of the world will murder off of the field of war in the next hundred years.”…

Note that this is really searching for times, not just strings. So for
instance, things like “this year” or “the past 60 years” or “1912–1984” or
“the next hundred years” all may match “February through June, 1945” (for some
of these, it depends on when they were written or the surrounding context of
the phrase).

The results are ranked from the most specific (“June 26, 1945” is smack dab in
the search range; while “the next hundred years” only vaguely matches the
search) and include a little bit of context.

This is an interesting puzzle to solve, and an innovation in searching that
I haven’t seen described or implemented before, and may be unique to my blog
if I ever get around to rolling it out.

Find Out More!

For more information on the topic or topics below (organized as “topic →
subtopic →
sub-subtopic”), click on any of the ♦ symbols to see other pages on this site that cover the topic. Or browse the site’s topic index at the “Outline” page.